Book Image

Flow-based Leadership: What the Best Firefighters can Teach You about Leadership and Making Hard Decisions

By : Judith L. Glick-Smith Ph.D
Book Image

Flow-based Leadership: What the Best Firefighters can Teach You about Leadership and Making Hard Decisions

By: Judith L. Glick-Smith Ph.D

Overview of this book

There comes a day when we have to make a tough decision under stress. That decision might change the course of our life. Flow-Based Leadership helps you improve your decision-making skills through the use of some great real-life stories of firefighters. The book first introduces the feeling called ‘flow’—teaching by example its importance in decision-making. Next, you’ll explore various techniques to initiate flow in critical situations and how to respond when flow doesn’t occur as expected. You will learn how to implement flow-based decision making and flow based-leadership within personal and professional circumstances. You will next encounter an extreme, experiential training program called Georgia Smoke Diver (GSD), and how it helps special military forces like Navy Seals and Army Rangers to maintain a calm focus in chaotic situations. Towards the end, the book uses the GSD program to describe the flow-based organizational framework and how it can be integrated into your life and workplace to achieve better decision-making skills. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to use flow-based leadership in your personal and professional life maintain clarity and confidence under duress.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Preconditions of Flow

Flow doesn’t happen for everyone. There are those who may never experience flow. For example, some schizophrenics do not have the ability to feel pleasure or joy. Because flow has a feel-good component, it is difficult for these people to enter into flow. In addition, people who are excessively self-absorbed and concerned about what others think may be unable to lose themselves in an activity. Because their focus is directed toward excessively worrying about what others are thinking, these people lack the psychic energy necessary to enter a flow experience.23 Other than these groups, most people have the ability to enter flow states. But what has to be in place for this to happen?

We each choose our own flow activities, based on the meaning we attach to them. Flow occurs at the intersection of the activity’s challenge level and our abilities to meet those challenges. In other words, to enter into flow, we have to balance challenges and skill at...